Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By : Vijay Kumar Velu
Book Image

Mobile Application Penetration Testing

By: Vijay Kumar Velu

Overview of this book

Mobile security has come a long way over the last few years. It has transitioned from "should it be done?" to "it must be done!"Alongside the growing number of devises and applications, there is also a growth in the volume of Personally identifiable information (PII), Financial Data, and much more. This data needs to be secured. This is why Pen-testing is so important to modern application developers. You need to know how to secure user data, and find vulnerabilities and loopholes in your application that might lead to security breaches. This book gives you the necessary skills to security test your mobile applications as a beginner, developer, or security practitioner. You'll start by discovering the internal components of an Android and an iOS application. Moving ahead, you'll understand the inter-process working of these applications. Then you'll set up a test environment for this application using various tools to identify the loopholes and vulnerabilities in the structure of the applications. Finally, after collecting all information about these security loop holes, we'll start securing our applications from these threats.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mobile Application Penetration Testing
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The smartphone market share


Understanding the market share will give us a clear picture about what cyber criminals are after and also what could be potentially targeted. The mobile application developers can propose and publish their applications on the stores, being rewarded by a revenue sharing of the selling price.

The following screenshot referenced from www.idc.com provides us with the overall smartphone OS market, 2015:

Since mobile applications are platform-specific, a majority of software vendors are forced to develop the applications for all the available operating systems.

The android operating system

Android is an open source Linux-based operating system for mobile devices (smartphones and tablet computers). It was developed by the Open Handset Alliance, which was led by Google and other companies. Android OS is Linux-based, and it can be programmed in C/C++, but most of the application development is done in Java (Java access to C libraries via JNI, short for Java Native Interface).

The iPhone operating system (iOS)

iOS was developed by Apple Inc. It was originally released in 2007 for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. Apple's mobile version of the OS X operating system used in Apple computers is iOS. BSD (short for Berkeley Software Distribution) is Unix-based and can be programmed in the Objective C and Swift languages.